Where Anthro Meets Bio

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us about yourself: Where are you from and what led you to U-M?

I grew up in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, did my bachelor’s and master’s degrees there, and then I left to continue my education. I went to England for my Ph.D. (University of East Anglia) and had the good fortune to spend most of my time in Panama at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, where I did most of my research work. Then I moved back to Mexico, where I held a position as a professor at the University of Veracruz. I went back to Mexico with a husband and a son, so we were looking for opportunities for both of us. My husband is also a scientist, so we came [to U-M] as a dual career. I was hired into the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and the Museum of Zoology. I have been at U-M for over 20 years, and just this year I joined the Department of Anthropology.

Did you always know you wanted to work in biology? How did you first become interested in the field?

My parents were professors at the University of Veracruz. My father was a mathematician, and my mother is a psychologist. I always did well in school and liked it; I never questioned whether I would follow the research path in general. When I was a kid, I remember a TV commercial that showed a young girl and then a woman wearing a lab coat. It said something like, “This girl, who is just eight years old, will be a marine biologist who will do something positive for the world.” I thought, “Oh, that could be me!” Right then I decided that I was going to be a biologist.

I went to college in Mexico, and at that time the college system was such that you went to a school that was specific to the profession you had decided on. So, I entered the biology school and when I was there, I thought, “Oh my gosh, what am I doing here? I want to be an architect!” But then I started taking classes and fell in love with biology, and that was it. 

So, I've been studying biology most of my life. The anthropological angle to my work came later, when I understood that the research I was pursuing with nonhuman primates could also be applied to understand evolutionary processes in humans. In Mexico and other parts of the world, people who study primates are mostly biologists, but in the U.S. many primatologists are anthropologists, so I think it’s an academic culture in the field that is different from country to country. I really came to understand more about anthropology through the work that I was doing as a biologist.

I imagine teaching courses through an anthropological lens might be slightly different from your courses in EEB. How do you see that difference in terms of approach or focus?

I have had the opportunity to teach a course, “Molecular Anthropology,” in the anthropology department, which I will teach again this fall term. When preparing that course, I definitely needed to think about what is relevant in both contexts, biology and anthropology. I have this dual vision of the biological evolutionary perspective, and how this work (including my own research) can be useful to inform genetic processes that occurred during the evolution of humans. So, although I see some differences in that the topic of this course is much more applied than other courses I have taught in EEB, it is still well within my area of interest, which makes it very exciting.

Teaching this class has been a good exercise for me, bridging these two disciplines into something that can be very integrative. Students learn concepts and tools that can be applied to a broad range of problems, from working with natural populations of primates that live today to understanding how to analyze primate evolution in general. These tools can also be applied to understand different aspects of historical and evolutionary events in humans.

How do you describe the focus of your work and research?

My research focuses on understanding the genetic processes and mechanisms occurring during the evolution of species, and in particular, those processes that have shaped primate diversity. A research topic that I am especially interested in is hybridization — when two different species meet again (usually they have diverged elsewhere) in a certain geographic area and can still interbreed and produce offspring. For a long time, hybridization was considered something aberrant, that only happened in rare circumstances and was detrimental. It wasn’t until molecular tools became broadly available that studies showed that hybridization is quite common during evolution. In anthropology, hybridization was finally more accepted in 2010 when the first Neanderthal genome was published, and there was clear, unequivocal evidence that this process had impacted the evolution of humans. In 15 years, we have advanced dramatically in our understanding of the role of hybridization in evolution, especially due to improvements in our ability to generate genomic data and the improvement of molecular approaches and analyses. But we still don’t understand much about the conditions under which some species interbreed and some don’t, or what parts of the genomes intermix and which don’t, and why. 

To me, this provides an opportunity to tie ideas from biology into anthropology. We can now use the howler monkey hybrid system we study as a model to address these types of questions more generally and to inform our understanding of the types of genomic interactions that could have occurred during the evolution of humans. This system exemplifies evolution in action, and that’s really exciting to me.

You have been through a lot of school as a student yourself. What advice do you have for students now, or for your student self?

My main advice for students is to choose a research topic that really excites them. If they like what they do, it will be easier to stay motivated and be successful. If I could meet myself when I was a student, the first thing I would say is not to rush too much. It’s OK to take time to do the things that you think are important, and not only the things that are urgent. Academically, I would remind myself that when you are starting a research career as a graduate student, you have the power of decision. You should carefully decide who to work with and not be worried about going to a prestigious institution, but instead to focus on researching who you would want to be working with and how well you can work with that person. Finally, I would encourage myself to find mentors who could guide me in my career, because it’s valuable to learn from people who have experience and vision — something that can be hard to do when you are just starting out.

When prospective graduate students contact me about their interest in joining my lab, I ask them to think about their own research interests and consider how the work we do in my lab fits their own research interests. I also stress the importance of thinking not only about the science, but also about the style of advising and mentoring they are looking for. I suggest they talk to the students in the labs they are interested in joining, so they can learn about the lab and department climate, and the mentoring approach of the potential advisor. Different professors have different ways of working, and students should consider what strategies work best for them.